Mexico’s President Launches Campaign To Encourage Mexican Americans To Vote Against Republicans

Never mind Russia collusion. Now the Mexican president wants to influence America’s next election. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is being accused at home for undermining Mexico’s democracy, is launching an “information campaign” that could aid Democrats in the United States.Mr. Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, is facing a domestic backlash for his attempt at tweaking Mexico’s independent electoral system to secure his political camp’s future electoral victories. Now he is launching a campaign to tell Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics not to vote for Republican candidates.Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, will travel to Washington Monday to meet with American officials to discuss the fentanyl crisis at the border, Mr. Lopez Obrador told reporters on Friday. Mr. Ebrard would also inform Mexicans and Hispanics in America about his new electoral initiative against Republicans, AMLO added.The plan seems to be animated by a Republican initiative to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. That, AMLO told reporters Friday, is “irresponsible.” He called it “an offense to the people of Mexico, a lack of respect for our independence, our sovereignty.”“If they use Mexico for their propaganda, electoral, and political purposes, we are going to call for them not to vote for that party because it is interventionist, inhumane, hypocritical, and corrupt,” Mr. Lopez Obrador said.Mexico is “not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less [permit] a government’s armed forces intervene,” he added.The Mexican president was responding to a bill introduced in January in the House by Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas. The legislation would authorize the use of military force to target Mexican cartels south of the border.Last week another Texas Republican, Representative Chip Roy, re-introduced a bill to designate several Mexican criminal groups — the Gulf Cartel, the Cártel del Noreste, the Cártel de Sinaloa, and the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación — as foreign terrorist organizations. Mr. Roy reacted to last week’s kidnapping of four American citizens at Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Two of the Americans, who drove across the border to undergo a reduced-price medical procedure in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, were killed. Mr. Lopez Obrador apologized for the incident, and his administration pledged to work with America to find the perpetrators. The Gulf cartel later dropped several cuffed gang members near the border, along with a hand-written letter of apology, saying the kidnapping was unauthorized by the cartel’s leadership. The event animated Congressional calls to get tough on organized crime at the southern border. Washington is concerned about a significant rise in overdose deaths caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid trafficked into America by increasingly violent Mexican cartels. “They are bold enough to kidnap and kill foreign nationals in broad daylight; there is no limit to the inhumane methods they will use to achieve their ultimate end — profiting off of human suffering,” Mr. Roy said in a statement to Fox News.According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, there were more than 106,000 drug overdose deaths reported in 2021. More than two-thirds of them involved fentanyl. Earlier this year, the Drug Enforcement Administration said that most of the fentanyl trafficked by the Cártel de Sinaloa and the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación “is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemical sources largely from China.”Mr. Lopez Obrador is tapping into a resentment in Mexico, where many believe that the drug problem is fueled by demand in America. “Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” Mr. Lopez Obrador said last week, while suggesting that Americans should “take care of their problem of social decay.”Yet, when Mr. Lopez Obrador became president he promised that crime in Mexico would subside with his less combative approach toward the cartels. Instead, crime bosses are emboldened, crime is on the rise, and Mexicans increasingly reel under the cartels’ influence over much of the country’s life. On top of that AMLO is facing pushback against his increasingly authoritarian hold on power — as in his attempt at reducing the size of Mexico’s independent electoral system. Mexicans fear that confining the National Electoral Institute endangers next year’s free and secure elections. Since acceding to the presidency in 2018, Mr. Lopez Obrador has shown little interest in playing by the established rules. He attacked journalists and academics who did not align with his views, lashed out at non-government organizations that investigated corruption, and questioned independent public agencies such as the Antitrust Commission and the National Commission on Human Rights. “Get a grip,” Mr. Crenshaw said after Mr. Lopez Obrador’s announcement that he would campaign against Republicans. “You should be campaigning against the cartels who are murdering your own people, not the Americans who want to help eradicate them.”

Mexico’s President Launches Campaign To Encourage Mexican Americans To Vote Against Republicans

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